About Joel Meyerowitz

Inspired by street photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, a young Joel Meyerowitz picked up a 35mm camera and began to document his own cultural landscape. This proved to be fruitful for Meyerowitz, who is now recognized as an early advocate of color photography as a form of “high” art. Shifting between black-and-white and color film, Meyerowitz ultimately chose color as his primary medium, and moved from the handheld 35mm camera to a large-format view camera, greatly influencing his image-making technique by introducing a slower, meditative process. Meyerowitz developed a keen eye for the changing light and subtleties of his surroundings. In recent years he has drawn praise for his immediate documentation of the September 11th attacks in New York, recognized for humanizing the destruction and recovery through his images; he claims that otherwise, "there would be no history."